The Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online website is designed to be a comprehensive information source and archive for Eamon adventures. This blog consists of both news about Eamon and my random thoughts about Eamon and the Eamon website.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Over the past year, the intrepid Huw Williams has worked tirelessly--though quietly--to lay the foundations for an extraordinarily comprehensive, online Eamon encyclopedia. Recently, this work has become open to the public.

The Wonderful Wiki of Eamon, which can be found at www.eamononline.com, is a wiki edited and curated by members of the extended Eamon community. Anyone can log in and begin lending a hand, whether it's by creating a page for an missing topic or by adding material on an existing one. Every area of the Eamon universe is touched on and what Huw has put together is nothing short of phenomenal.

As a great example of the potential of Huw's project, check out the page for The Lair of the Minotaur. Included are summaries of the plot, reviews, and a section detailing how its characters and geography relate to the larger Eamon universe. Even the original MAINPGM in BASIC has been included. While not all Eamon adventures have received this exhaustive a treatment, you're invited to pick your favorite Eamon adventure and assist in giving it the same treatment.

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Our very own Thomas Ferguson has had his debut Eamon adventure, A Runcible Cargo, nominated for the XYZZY IF Games award(s). If you haven't played Runcible, you should. And if you have a spare moment, you can show your support by voting for it at the XYZZY Awards page. Voting ends on April 15th.A Runcible Cargo is included with the Eamon Deluxe 5.0 package and also available in a stand alone format for Windows users.In other Eamon news...

Work is nearly finished on an old French Eamon that was unearthed (as a very damaged Apple II disk image) last fall. Originally a version 6 Eamon, "Le H.L.M. Maudit" (or "Tenement of the Damned") has been translated into English, converted to Eamon Deluxe, and is now being backported (as a version 7 style Eamon) to a new Apple II disk image. The salvaged adventure is a short, but well executed (and rather humorous), hack'n'slash romp that was recently reviewed in the March 2013 Eamon Deluxe Newsletter. Both the Eamon Deluxe version and the Apple II disk image backport will offer the option of being played in either English or French.

A new adventure is currently being tested and debugged: Eamon Deluxe #25 - The Treachery of Zorag by Derek C. Jeter includes active monsters that players can talk to, ask questions of, and otherwise interact with on a much more advanced level than that found in standard adventures. Among other special features, it also has a very large map which includes over three hundred rooms that cover multiple different settings and types of terrain. Derek is the very skilled Eamon author who's debut adventure, "Stronghold of Kahr-Dur", was released to favorable reviews last fall and "The Treachery of Zorag" is going to be one that Eamon fans will not want to miss. Its predicted public release date is late April or early May of 2013.It has come to my attention that the "plain text" editions of the Eamon Deluxe Newsletter are not easily readable on non-Windows computers, nor can they be displayed without plugin workarounds on any web browser except Internet Explorer. With the release of Eamon Deluxe 5.0, a primary focus of modern Eamon development is accessibility. This means that new material should designed for cross platform flexibility and 100% compatible with the screen reading software used by vision impaired fans. The plain text newsletter editions, which are currently available as Rich Text Format documents, are soon going to be replaced with simple HTML versions.Likewise, this blog itself has been reported to have compatibility issues with screen readers and, among other problems, doesn't allow vision impaired readers to post comments. Currently I'm considering the option of re-posting all blogs on a more compatible mirror site, but if anyone has an easier solution or any suggestions as to possible workarounds for this problem please contact me. In the meantime, vision impaired users can email their comments to either Matt Clark (eamonag [at] gmail.com), Thomas Ferguson (tfeamon [at] gmail.com), or myself (eamondeluxe [at] gmail.com) for posting.Two previously unavailable newsletters have been added to the Guild archive page. Both originally published in 1987, the new additions to the archive include a newsletter by Kent Sullivan regarding the C64 Eamon cousin, Imagery! and a loosely written publication describing an Atari ST port of the original Eamon system.There is quite a bit more Eamon-related material currently in development or awaiting final polish. Among the copious collection lingering about the Guild workspace like a mimic in the Beginners Cave: a set of working, fully playable Apple II disk images containing the short lived "Eamon Pro" system; updates to the Guild's classic Eamon disk image library which will once again be bootable (via emulator) and patched with fixes from the EAG's list of known bugs/issues; new additions to the Eamon Deluxe adventure pack, "The Lost Treasures of Eamon", which include "Beneath Mount Imagery" (converted from the C64 Imagery! system) and "Crypt Crashers-- The Tomb of Horrors" (from an excellent Atari ST Eamon port); additional Eamon Deluxe adventure packs updated and made available for the new 5.0 system, including "The Donald Brown Adventures", "The Roger Pender Adventures", "The Robert Parker Adventures" and "Classic Eamon Adventures Volume One"; and... many more items of interest to Eamon fans.